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Japanese convenience store, FamilyMart, just announced they are installing charging stations for next‐generation vehicles (EV, Electric Vehicle/ PHEV, Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle) at roughly 500 of its stores all over Japan after this summer.

As of this month, 34 FamilyMart stores already have charging stations installed.

Rapi:t, a popular sharp-looking rapid train running between Kansai International Airport and Namba in Osaka, is normally colored in blue. However for a limited time until the end of June, the exterior of some of the Rapi:t trains has been changed to red, which is the color of Gundam's enemy, Neo Zeon. The special trains will make a maximum of 8 round trips every day.

Terra Motors, Japan’s very own electric vehicle startup (no stranger to Akihabara News), is preparing to launch their A4000i smartphone-enabled electric scooter this summer, and they recently invited us to the MONO startups space in Tokyo Bay to get up close and personal with it.

Ocharaku, Japanese specialized store for headphones, is going to release 2 models of new In-ear canal earphones.

These 2 models have a different length of phase correction tube built-in. According to Ocharaku, every person has a different length of the external auditory canal, and the sounds you hear become better when the length of the earphone tube and ear canal are as close as possible.

BRULÉ, Inc., Japanese retailer of foreign goods, is going to start selling Canadian 3D scanner "matterform" in early June.

"matterform" scans 2,000 points of an object placed on its turntable per second using an HD camera and 2 lasers. Maximum size of a scannable object is W190xH250xL190mm. The minimum scannable resolution is 0.43mm. You can choose a scanning file among STL, OBJ and PLY.

Regarding scanning time, it takes 5 minutes for High-speed and 10 minutes for High-quality mode.

Elecom is going to release the compact ball-type mono speaker ASP-SMP050 series - a φ3.5mm stereo mini jack for the earphone jack of any smartphone, iPhone or other devices compatible with a φ3.5mm stereo mini jack.

The ASP-SMP050 series is slightly smaller than an actual ping-pong ball. It is able to output 1.5W powerful sound, which is roughly 8 times more powerful than a smartphone speaker.

Terrie’s Take is a selection of Japan-centric news collected and collated by long-time resident and media business professional Terrie Lloyd. AkihabaraNews is pleased to present Terrie’s learned perspective; we all could use another take on the news - here’s Terrie’s:

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